1. Field
This disclosure is generally related to filling paper forms with electronic data. More specifically, this disclosure is related to schema mapping between fields in a paper form and an online data record, automatically retrieving the values from the online data record, and synthesizing the retrieved values to create an image of the paper form with filled-in values.
2. Related Art
Electronic data records are increasingly used in industries that conventionally relied heavily on paper records. For example, in the health care industry, many hospitals and medical offices now maintain electronic health records of patients. Nevertheless, due to various reasons such as regulatory requirements, paper forms are still mandatory in many situations. For instance, patients are usually asked to fill out a medical history form prior to each office visit. Such form often cannot be waived even though the patients already have visited the same office and have filled out the same form in the past. Because filling out these paper forms takes extra time, the patients are often advised to arrive at the office earlier than their scheduled appointment times in order to leave sufficient time for filling out paper forms.
To reduce the waiting time at the medical office, many medical offices send forms to patients in advance of their scheduled appointments and request patients to bring the filled-in form when they visit the office. However, patients still need to fill out the forms by hand. On the other hand, most information needed to fill out the paper forms is retrievable from the patient's electronic data record. Thus, it is advantageous to leverage the information from the electronic data records in order to improve the efficiency of paper form filling.